Total Eclipse

Posting this on 12.12.2018 as the UK is about to eclipse anything that has gone before it at least since 55BC and the PM facing a vote of no confidence from her own party this evening.

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This was an interesting year. Today's total Solar Eclipse had been preceded by months of dire warnings about the end of the world.

And generally, during the year we had all been extraordinarily busy at work preparing for the second End of the World at midnight on 31.12.and the start, or rather not, of the new millennium. Everything that was powered by electricity or even batteries was destined to fail at midnight, no working ATM etc. And as my company was involved in the health business including large computer-driven machines for head surgery, there was great concern.

As finance and administration manager, my main concern was with ensuring the entire data systems were secure and would be available on the first working day in January 2000.

Today though had a big party feel about it at the office. We would have been about five people that day and we set up a festive lunch table in the conference room with its huge floor to ceiling windows & sliding doors on to a large terrace and a view directly to where the eclipse would take place.

We set up the large conference room TV to receive Sky News from the Uk and started watching the druids, sun worshippers and End of the World prophets sitting in various locations in the south of England and watching people board all manner of aircraft, including Concorde, to get a bird's eye view.

As the time for us, on the southern outskirts of Munich in the small dormitory town of Gilching, approached so did the clouds and it seemed we would miss it. However, at the moment the eclipse started, a hole was ripped open in the clouds and we got an excellent view of the entire event.

Almost within seconds of it ending the clouds closed back in and we had the most enormous rain storm!

The eclipse photo is one I really did take with our company digital Kodak camera, one that stored the data on a standard PC 3.5" floppy disk - the ones that weren't at all floppy compared to the first 5.25" real floppies.

I am topped off with an operating room surgical cloth cap our company had produced as a gag for surgeons promoting one of our machines as hot as "red hot chilli peppers". The hi-tech Zeiss cardboard and plastic mirror eye protectors were being given away for months ahead by various companies but were in short supply the week before the event as the media hype reached it's peak.

A fun day and a change from millennium project fear.